NFC – NDEF Text Record

An NDEF Text record is a record used to store plain (unformatted) text on an NFC tag.

Attributes

GoToTags represents NDEF Text records with the following attributes:

Attribute

Description

Text

The plain text. Required.

LanguageCode

The language code of the text. Default is English (en). Most systems ignore this.

EncodingType

The character encoding of the text; either UTF8 or UTF16. UTF8 is the default and should be used unless the extra characters of UTF16 are required.

Use Cases

Text records are a basic record type used to store a small amount of text; often this is a unique ID. The amount of text is limited by the user memory capacity of the NFC chip.

Behavior

Android

Android has native support for acting upon text records. The text is shown on a basic screen with no ability to act on the text.

Other

iOS and Windows do not have native support for acting upon text records.

Best Practices

If a text record is used to store a unique id to be read by an application, it is a better practice to use an NDEF mime type record instead. Most systems have native support for reading text records by displaying the text. If the value of the text is only for internal purposes, storing the text in a mime type record will prevent the text value from being displayed if the tag is read by an unknown application, as systems do not have native behavior for handling mime type records.